The BJP's plans to corner Shibu Soren by campaigning against his alleged involvement in a 30-year-old case seem to have backfired, with support for the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha leader among the State's people growing suddenly.
VENKITESH RAMAKRISHNAN in Ranchi and JamataraON the face of it, the Bharatiya Janata Party in Jharkhand has enough reasons to celebrate. Shibu Soren, Jharkhand Mukthi Morcha (JMM) chief and the State BJP's most formidable adversary, has been booked and sent to jail on serious criminal charges, which include inciting and abetting a massacre. The JMM leader was also forced to resign as the Union Minister for Coal in the background of the BJP's campaign against him on charges of jumping bail and abstaining from court since 1986 in the same case.
However, the mood in BJP offices in Jharkhand or among party leaders is not one of jubilation and delight, but of gloom. In fact, the majority of the leaders admit, albeit sotto voce, that the sequence of events in the "Soren case" and its impact on the State's population is pushing the party into a political disaster. Clearly, commonsensical political perception is standing on its head in Jharkhand.
The reasons for the pessimism are not far to seek. It is evident all over Jharkhand in the form of growing mass support for the JMM leader. Even in Jamatara, where Shibu Soren is detained, and in Chirudih, the village where the JMM leader allegedly incited the mob violence in 1975 that led to the murder of 10 people, mostly Muslims, the groundswell of support for Soren is palpable.
A sizable section of the hundreds who gather every day before the Jamatara Women's College - the principal's chamber has been converted into a makeshift prison to detain Soren - to have a darshan of the leader and express solidarity with him is not composed of traditional followers of the JMM. Tariq Ali, from Jadurhi village near Chirudih, one such neo-admirer of Soren, told Frontline that though he and his friends never supported the JMM, the situation was different now. Ali said: "Today we will do anything for him."
At Chirudih, there is a kind of ban on the media. A group of youngsters stops this correspondent's vehicle as it tries to enter the village. Raising slogans in support of Soren, the group blames the media for "creating this unwanted problem". "We are all living peacefully here, now you rake up a 30-year-old case and try to divide people," said Mohamed Basher, one of the youngsters, who claimed to be a relative of one of the people killed in the 1975 violence. The banner put up at the entrance to the village reflects similar sentiments: "The conspiracy against Veer Shibu Soren will not succeed. The village will stay united under his leadership and the whole village can lay down its lives for the leader."
THE popular emotion generated by the events that led to Soren's resignation from the Union Ministry on July 24, his surrender before the court on August 2 and his detention since then is so intense that the JMM leader seems to have regained the political halo that he had around him in the 1970s and 1980s. Soren's popularity was declining since the 1980s, especially after he got embroiled in a number of legal tangles involving bribery, acquisition of assets disproportionate to his known sources of income, and the mysterious disappearance of his private secretary Shivanath Jha. But all that seems to have been forgotten in Jharkhand now, as more and more people refer to him as "Dishom Guru" (Great Leader), a sobriquet that he had during the 1970s and 1980s when the Jharkhand agitation was at its peak.
Clearly elated at his burgeoning mass appeal, JMM leaders say that the BJP's conspiracy in reviving the Chirudih case has backfired. According to Stephen Marandi, senior JMM leader and Rajya Sabha member, the BJP conspired to revive the case with a clear political objective. He said: "They thought that by putting Guruji behind bars, they would not only push him out of the Ministry and discredit the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Ministry at the Centre, but break our alliance with the Congress and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)." Going by the legal procedures that led to the revival of the case, it may be difficult to prove the conspiracy charge, but there is little doubt that the BJP went into a campaign overdrive on the issue.
The court records on the case state that on January 23, 1975, mob violence broke out in Chirudih village leading to the death of 10 people. Soren's name was not in the list of the accused in the First Information Report (FIR) but was included during the investigation on the basis of a dying declaration of one Lokendra Soren. The declaration said that Shibu Soren held a meeting at Chirudih on January 23 following an attack on tribal people by non-tribal people and there he made a call to retaliate. This, the declaration said, was what led to the mob violence. Despite the investigation and the inclusion of Shibu Soren's name, the charges in the case were not filed for nearly a decade. Finally, in 1986, 60 people including Soren were charge-sheeted. There were a few hearings in 1986, but after that the case went "missing" for over 15 years until the Jharkhand High Court Chief Justice set up "fast track" courts in 2002 for the speedy disposal of cases. In fact, even the court does not have any records pertaining to the case for this period. In this long gap, 25 of the accused and 20 of the witnesses died. However, the court issued warrants against 52 people including Soren. While the issue of warrants is recorded in the court files, there is no evidence to show that the warrant was delivered to Soren.
The latest sequence of events in the case started after the warrant was issued in April. JMM leaders and Soren's lawyers say that Soren could not have responded to the warrant since he (or anybody else) did not have information that it had been issued. However, on July 13, BJP leader and former Union Minister Arun Jaitley said in the Rajya Sabha that there was a warrant against Soren and that he was a fugitive from law. It is this statement that JMM leaders highlight as evidence of a BJP conspiracy in reviving the case. "How was it that Jaitley knew about the warrant when even the court has no records to show that the warrant was delivered to Soren?," asks Stephen Marandi. This question and the response to it may certainly become a matter of long legal and political debates, but the Jamatara Sub-divisional Magistrate cleared the confusion by issuing a fresh warrant against Soren on July 17.
It is after this that Soren initially went into hiding, resigned from the Ministry and finally surfaced and surrendered. During this entire period the BJP was engaged in a high-pitched campaign against "law-breaker Soren". In fact, the JMM leader's case was at the core of the BJP's campaign against "tainted Ministers" in the UPA government.
THE BJP and its partners in the NDA did succeed in ousting Soren from the Ministry, but that has not brought any political benefits to the BJP in Jharkhand. On the contrary, Soren has acquired the status of a "living martyr" and the State BJP's political marginalisation has become even more acute than what it was during the Lok Sabha polls, when it lost in 13 of the 14 seats.
This predicament has also led to the intensification of internal rivalries in the BJP. A section of the State BJP led by Chief Minister Arjun Munda has even launched a whisper campaign accusing former Union Minister Yashwant Sinha and his supporters of pushing the party into the hapless situation. Munda and his associates point out that they had repeatedly warned Sinha as well as the national leadership about the problems in carrying out an aggressive campaign against Soren on emotive issues such as the Chirudih incident. An associate of the Chief Minister said: "As a tribal leader himself and as a former associate of Soren in the JMM, Munda had an understanding of how things would develop if the party went ahead with an aggressive campaign on these issues. But unfortunately, none in the Central leadership was ready to listen to him."
Informed sources in the BJP told Frontline that attempts were made to restrain central leaders, particularly Jaitley and Leader of the Opposition L.K. Advani, as early as July 17. On this date, a joint meeting of the BJP's Jharkhand and Central leaders was held in Delhi. Twenty-one State leaders and several national leaders, including Pramod Mahajan, Rajnath Singh and Sanjay Joshi, attended it. The basic purpose of the meeting was to discuss the strategy for the Assembly elections in Jharkhand but, naturally, the campaign on "tainted Ministers" also came up for discussion.
Pointing out that the campaign will antagonise the Santhals and will obliterate whatever little support the party had among the tribal people, several leaders close to Munda advocated a "go-slow policy" on Soren. It was also argued that given the JMM's own past political association with the BJP, the party should not antagonise it and should keep a door open for the restoration of the alliance. One senior leader reportedly emphasised that even if the BJP were to treat the JMM as one of its political adversaries, it came only after the Congress and the RJD.
But all these, said the source, were brushed aside in the face of the arguments of senior BJP leaders such as Yashwant Sinha. Sinha and his supporters, including the new BJP State president Raghuvar Das, pushed forward a strong anti-Soren and anti-JMM line, saying that a head-on campaign against the JMM would help in both State and national politics.
The contention of this section - which was accepted and implemented by the Central leadership - was that the Congress, particularly Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, would not only drop Soren from the Ministry but end the very association with JMM, seeing it as a liability. This group also contended that trying to split the Congress and the JMM was the only course before the BJP, especially because the party's support base among the non-tribal people was drifting towards the Congress after the Lok Sabha elections.
Undoubtedly, the party is persisting with this "splitting plan", albeit less doggedly than before. The statements of BJP leaders such as Munda, in the wake of Soren's incarceration, point towards this. The statements have alleged that it was the Congress that originally conspired to list Soren as an accused in the Chirudih case. Munda said: "Soren's name was not among the accused in the FIR, it was the then Congress government of Bihar that included him." However, these statements do not seem to evoke any sympathy for the beleaguered Chief Minister or his party.
By all indications, the troubles of the State BJP are bound to mount in the coming days, especially in the context of the JMM's own counter-offensive plans. The party has decided to challenge legally Munda for "suppressing" his caste identity while contesting from a Reserved (Scheduled Tribe) constituency in the last two Assembly elections and Jaitley for "misleading" the Rajya Sabha about the first warrant against Soren.
